I recently saw a review of Go Class on Android 4 Schools. This app definitely provides something we have been looking for. Just to summarize, my district decided on Android a few years back, first utilizing the Samsung Galaxy Tabs and now with a few hundred Nexus 7 among all the nook HDs and other devices. So one question that always comes up is how to push content to the devices. Go Class explains what it does:

Built to support the classroom dynamics, GoClass aids the instructor in delivering rich content effortlessly and effectively. You can achieve so much more in your classroom by doing very little. It brings you power of technology combined with the time tested teaching methodology of SHOW-EXPLAIN-ASK. It allows you to create, deliver, evaluate, and update content all from the same application and store it all on the Cloud. See how it works!

Sounds pretty good, yes? Before going forward though, I would slightly warn they are in a free beta. That could mean they will stay free, they will go away without explanation, or they will come back with an exorbitantly high price after the beta. So how does it work? Well, first you need to create your class. Your typical data entry of student names, emails , and information. You then begin creating your lesson plan. Really, this just organizes your content. You can add media (images, movies, etc), weblinks, pdfs, and other documents. Once you finish, you can create some questions for your students. When time to teach, you can project your content or push it out to your devices. Pretty cool. With all the 1:1s, BYODs, and the like, I can definitely see this being a good way to share content. Similar to what a Course Management System (Moodle, Blackboard, etc) does, but maybe a little quicker and cleaner. I will continue to play around with this to see how it works. Can’t you see this working for teacher professional development as well?

With all the shiny devices out there, most people do not think to use a small arsenal of tech tools. We want the biggest, fastest tools, without sometimes thinking of the learning that can take place. Take for instance a recent article and infographic that I posted here. Infographics can provide so many teaching moments in pretty much every curricular area. In this one I used think of how students can use this in math…looking at the populations of the countries in an outside the highlighted circle. Making a spreadsheet to total up the populations. Looking at percentages or using decimals. Going deeper into higher math functions. Social Studies is pretty obvious, but to go deeper looking at the style of government inside and outside to see if there are any similarities. Science -can the resources there sustain these large populations. So many things. So why, why do we try to make things so difficult by introducing all these confusing devices and applications? Sure, they can work some, and in this case, if you had a couple devices, you could definitely use them with these infographics, but we just tend to make things difficult in keeping up with the neighboring school district or county. Keep it simple, right?

If you call yourself a geek, you probably like zombies. The Walking Dead is a favorite of ours…although this last season came across pretty lame. The new World War Z looks pretty promising too. I am not a Brad Pitt fan, but have wanted to read the book. Will take in the movie after reading it.

Ever struggle to find a file at school or home that you know you saved? With all the various storage these days, network drives at school, NAS and other home storage, we literally possess huge amounts of storage. Of course, then, we would lose some of our files. You can use your OS embedded search, Windows or Mac, but that sometimes does not search across all your network drives, or you have to go to that specific drive to search. Enter LAN Desk. With this free app, you can put in your IP range, and it will search across your network for files.

So I began trying it–you can see my range in my home network. After this, if it works like advertised, I am going to try it at work on a 10 network. If it does work as advertised, then this is definitely a pretty good find. With all the horsepower behind computers these days, searching still sucks. Will be nice if this really does go across the network.